I was lucky enough to spend a bunch of time with Chimpanzees and Gorillas in Africa (mostly West Africa). I got to carry them, play with them and just chill with them in the jungle [1].
Staring into their eyes it is impossible to deny we are them and they are us. Their facial expressions, emotions, reactions, playfulness and also anger, jealousy and all the rest are incredible to be a part of. Often I was on the other side of a fence, but the times I was right in the middle of it all are something I will never forget as long as I live.
I have no doubt future generations will look back on us as heathens for keeping intelligent animals locked in cages.
Future generations will look at us as monsters propping up highly western economy dependent sanctuaries in economic fragile regions just before the big crash, sentencing sentients to die out of romanticism and a unrealistic view of us in reality.
No I don’t, and it wasn’t intended that way. It was the opposite— they’re magnificent. They’re clearly not of our species. That does not mean they should be caged.
Excuse being the kill joy: the fellow might be mimicking a gesture it learned from other visitors. That's not to say they don't have an inner life--we're all made of the same substrate, after all.
It wasn’t so much the kiss; but the full interaction—it came up to me and wanted to see my son who was covered up in his stroller and not facing the enclosure, then it was seemingly satisfied with my reaction, and left.
Of course my dog will whine for food, or smack it’s water dish with her nose, but this felt much different akin to similar experiences I’ve had with strangers who smile and comment about how adorable my son was as an infant.
Yes. We are particularly accomplished mimics. Originality is exceedingly rare. We like to think of ourselves as different, but we are just inhabited by far more ghosts than animals without language.
We do mimic, but I was saying the animal wasn't exactly (probably) expressing its affection/adoration for a human baby with a flying kiss gesture. Had the animal picked up a vulgar gesture from a human visitor, it might as well have chosen that gesture at the baby instead, without necessarily knowing its inappropriate. A human parent, understandably, will not be very pleased with such an incident.
Obviously it would be interesting if that's what happened, but no, what they were saying is that it could well be that it had only been exposed to visitors doing nice gestures and was repeating them back with no understanding of nice vs nasty.
Not that the anecdote proves their guess is more right than yours, but afaik there is more evidence of animals mirroring unthinkingly than understanding.
Mirroring and copying unthinkingly is how we humans learn. If what we mirrored gives us the desired results we keep doing it. Questioning and understanding those actions comes lot later.
I have learned this from my toddler son who picked up some 2 3 word sentences from the cartoons that he watches. He ofcourse has no clue what those words mean, but he does know when to use them and what response he gets from them.
English isn't the language we speak at home but he picked up "wake up" when I am sleeping and try to wake me up, "careful" when doing something where he or one of us could fall. All by seeing and hearing things said repeatedly on similar actions in cartoons.
Sure, we learn by copying things. But there isn't, that I'm aware of, any evidence that an orangutan has done the learning part rather than just the copying part.
It wouldn't shock me if we did learn they can learn that way, but it also wouldn't shock me if it was just blindly copying human gestures without learning anything from what happens when they do.
I still think that said orangutan didn't have to blow a kiss and wave goodbye, after all it already had what it wanted: seeing a baby. It could as well just turn around and leave.
Orangutans likely don't blow kisses in the wild, so it not only imitated it, but also used it in an appropriate manner and context, without an immediate need to satisfy.
Chimps are roughly as smart as a 5 year-old human, and toddlers sure blow kisses and wave goodbye with full intention.
The concept of cargo culting came from a situation with humans; while a dog might also do it, it doesn't make sense to cite it as a reason why a behavior is somehow inhuman.
Factory farms will be looked back on with 10,000x more shame and horror than zoos. Zoos barely scratch the surface of the immense and unnecessary cruelty we inflict on animals. We torture 70 billion land animals to death every year and the poor things will never even understand why - they're just babies, mentally speaking.
It's objectively the greatest evil humans have ever committed, and for our own pleasure at that. We inflict pure hellish suffering because "tAsTe bUdS gO BRRR!"
It's hard to even comprehend something more comically, absurdly evil, both in terms of motive and sheer scale of suffering.
At least zoos do trigger an empathy response and get people to care about animals more.
False. 10-20% of the world population does not and we're just fine.
> So we need to kill animals for that.
No, you want to kill animals because you want tasty food. Not because you "need" meat. No one living in an industrialized country does. It's trivial to create a plant-based balanced diet (and a tasty one at that.)
> Zoos absolutely not required for humans to survive.
Neither are factory farms. They exist to satisfy "taste buds go brr." But that is not worth literally torturing[1] an animal to death.
I’m not sure that’s a fair statement to make categorically.
Many zoos provide homes, food, and veterinary care for animals that would not be able to survive in the wild. For example, the mountain lion at Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is blind, and many of their other animals had been kept illegally by their previous owners, were confiscated by Arizona Game & Fish, and needed a place to live so they wouldn’t die.
There is also the grim reality that most pets would run away and not come back if you were to open the "prison doors". Think of birds, reptiles, dogs etc.
Our interaction with other life on this planet is very human centric, some call this human supremacism. A line is drawn between us and other animals, and the justification is quite arbitrary in my opinion. A line that is used to justify a vast number of atrocities and systemic exploitation. I don't believe there is no meaningful difference between a human and a cricket. But between a human and a dog or pig? That's close enough that I'm willing to extrapolate.
My dogs that have escaped the yard go walkabout for a bit and then make their way home. My daughter's covid puppy has zero desire to be away from his human family- he's constantly looking for a human family member to hang out with and won't scamper away given the chance.
Now a bird/snake generally will be gone given the chance- but they truly are wild animals, while dogs are bred to be co-dependent with humans.
Indeed dogs have been genetically modified over millennia to the point many wouldn't even be able to survive in the wild, whether you think that justifies our actions is up to you.
In addition the chances they want to escape are smaller than for birds. I looked it up and found this source https://www.petlink.net/blog/chance-dogs-coming-back-run-awa... that says "The unfortunate reality is that 15% of dogs across the United States go missing.". For context that's not 15% of dogs want to leave and do so. What's the percentage of dogs that had the chance to leave? Let's say 50%, which would imply that given the chance 1 in 3 dogs left. Albeit not all of the because they disliked their home/prison.
Looking at the language used in that article exposes some mental gymnastics. They simultaneously state that dogs could find their way back if they wanted and compare it to loosing a child! No, the dog is not a child, and if the reasons you provide why they "go missing" are "Fear from loud noises, Easy escape routes, Boredom and Prey drive" I find it hard to ignore that these are adult conscious beings that may not want to live with us, and only do so when given no alternative.
> many wouldn't even be able to survive in the wild, whether you think that justifies our actions is up to you
I wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild.
Some dog breeding is nonsense. But for the most part, we adapted to each other. If you look at the most efficient land predators, it’s humans, cats and dogs. (Dogs are also the only fellow persistence hunting mammals and, apart from some lizards, the only animals to practice it period [1].)
Our domestication of herbivores is exploitative. Our domestication of dogs and acceptance of cats is far closer to an alliance.
> most pets would run away and not come back if you were to open the "prison doors"
This is not true of any pet I’ve had. The dog was always gunning for an open door. And the cat enjoys unsupervised time outdoors when weather permits. They both always came home.
Also, cats aren’t truly domesticated. If there is a creature that “chooses” to live with us, it’s cats.
Once had a cockatiel that escaped via a loose window, it flew around the neighbourhood for a few hours, then sat on a branch near the window waiting to be let back in.
Obviously orangutans are much smarter as a species, they are know to pass down knowledge/behaviors, including tool usage, down generations. But there could be more to this behavior. A dog instinctively knows to eat grass when they have stomach issues and Alaskan Bears eat certain plants to expel parasites after hibernation. How do they know? Zoopharmacognosy is a fascinating subject that needs more research.
When my wife was pregnant the doc said to let them know if she had any cravings for minerals, clay, or something weird like that. Turns out it can mean a vitamin deficiency. Not sure how the mind knows to send out a specific craving besides food and water.
I have this after eating a bare steak. I think there's something about eating a lot of something that does not contain carbs that immediately turns on craving for sugar.
I picked up dark chocolate as a snack in early 2020, which I chose very specifically to avoid carbs. I also use cocoa powder to make low-carb ice cream for the same reason.
I guess I've used it this way for long enough now that I've broken my default association between chocolate and sugar.
I'm a little bitter-sensitive, and it's the most-pleasant 88%+ I've had so far.
Still inevitably some carbs in cocoa, so you can do some carb-budget damage if you eat more than a serving--but I feel like it's a good treat for its weight.
They call a serving size 1/3 of the bar, with 11g carbs (4g fiber, 3g sugar). I think the bar is 3x5 squares, and I generally just have one at a time. Not sure I've had more than 3 squares in a day.
I think that would be around 7g total carbs, a bit under 2g sugar, and about 2.4g fiber (i.e. around 4.6g net carbs.)
(edit: i've seen them at cvs and target, at least--though my nearest cvs no longer carries the brand)
I say this after eating a tomato sauce. Of all foods to cause a craving for a follow up, tomato sauces are the top. Next up is smoked meat (bbq) makes me want banana pudding, but I think that's a trained habit vs a craving like tomato sauces.
When I had thrush but didn't know it, I craved yogurt and garlic, both of which would be excellent in restoring floral balance. I don't know how bodies know these things, but they do! It's fascinating.
Another one that I've been watching recently is chicks knowing to take dust baths with zero interaction with adult chickens. One reason for this behavior is apparently pest control.
I find it interesting when people attribute abstract intentions to this kind of behaviour. The chick's probably not thinking "man I gotta dust myself for mites", it probably just feels good to get dusty. Now, the reason it feels good is probably that dust baths are correlated with fewer parasites and better overall outcomes, but I doubt the chick knows that.
Same thing with cats liking scritches under their chin. They're not thinking "ah yes I am scent marking this human", scent glands are probably just itchy.
Sure, correlation like that is possibly a bit specious.
On the topic of chicks and dust baths, it's quite interesting because as soon as they encounter dirt for the first time they all do the same things. If you've never seen it I recommend looking for a video. But it seems like a weird behavior to have in every chick I've hatched. TBH, I love seeing weird inherent behaviors emerge like that.
Cats can smell those scent markings though. They do also mark their territory in other ways. Our cats really do the rubbing thing during feeding, so i think they are trying to mark their territory, lol.
I'd considered the dog eating grass thing as more of a now-disputed myth, but maybe someone has evidence. Either way my own dog loves munching on the taller/thicker grass every time we walk, like he's a sheep. His favourite foods also include broccoli and bok choy so that could be why. I think a lot of people downplay the role plants play in a dog's diet (not required but helpful especially with processed diets that can lack organ meat etc), and they don't always get fed them at home.
I've had half a dozen dogs, and every single one of them ate grass every chance they could get- in large quantities. I also don't think it has anything to do with having an upset stomach. Dogs seem to really enjoy grass, and make it a regular part of their diet... I know they likely can't extract any calories from it, but it may have other benefits.
There is nutrition in grass which is available to mammals like dogs (and humans). They are mostly cellulose, but plants use carbohydrates and proteins for their own structure and metabolism, and these are present in all plants in at least small amounts. Roots, shoots and fleshy stalks, are better than the leaves. Like an unpleasant, less nutritious lettuce or celery with too much fibre. Those are also hard to get meaningful calories from at like 50 - 100 calories per pound, but there's some calories, and there's other nutrients in them too.
The cellulose aka fibre is useful for them too, for the same reason as us, even if there are not many calories or other nutrients available. Dry food, bones, high protein diets can all benefit from a bit of bulk.
I've been told that wild dogs and wolves eat the digestive contents of herbivores which is semi-digested (free range haggis!), which definitely seems true to me given how much both of mine go for rabbit/sheep droppings. This supposedly supplies some more available vegetative nutrients to them. But this came from a pet nutritionist, I'm not sure how strict or scientific their training is.
The only thing dogs like more than cat feces is human feces. I assume that is deeply breeded-in. If you are a group of 50-100 nomadic hunter(-gatherer)s, you will appreciate not so much smelling surroundings.
I have a dog that literally only eats grass when he needs to retch something up. He'll go to the back door and whine and gag, whine and gag. If we're upstairs, he'll come fetch me. I don't stop him, either. I've learned that lesson. He's a mutt breed, we think half Yorkshire Terrier and half Miniature Schnauzer, for whatever that's worth. Our full-breed Rat Terrier did no such thing in 17 years of life but the mutt has been doing it since we got him nearly 15 years ago!
We minded a labrador once (notorious appetites), he'd eat capsicums, and on the neighbourhood walks would even go for raw green olives that fell from trees onto the paths. I'm pretty sure they are very bitter which sensible animals interpret as poison but not he. So we had to steer away from those during that season.
One of the most adorable TV shows I’ve seen is “Orangutan Jungle School” about the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation’s orangutan rescue/rehabilitation/release program. The series is available on a number of streaming services and many clips on YouTube.
This is THE classic Orangutan series to watch. I think some episodes (excerpts?) are available on Youtube Smithsonian Channel. Here is one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3hJgI2UrSg
Anybody who watches these will come away with a deep appreciation of the Natural World, Darwinian Theory and how Human-like (even more than Chimpanzees/Gorillas) Orangutans are. After a while you forget that they are a different species and start laughing/crying/empathizing with these beautiful animals.
Very highly recommended to watch with your kids and entire family.
Did that self-administered plant-based treatment have an orangutan-FDA EUA authorization? What does the Cochrane study on wound-treatment with leaves say? Was there publication bias on successful trials of wound leaf treatment? Was the funnel plot of orangutan wound-leaf treatment studies asymmetric or symmetric? Was the relative risk less than 1? Is the orangutan p-hacking (were there 19 other orangutans who applied the same species leaf to their wound with no effect, and this orangutan kept them from the BBC's cameras)? If the orangutan was basing its experiment off animal-model studies of _homo sapiens_, how well should it expect those studies to carry over to Pongo pygmaeus? Did a supplement manufacturer fund the orangutan's trial? Wasn't it dangerous for the orangutan to self-administer based on some non-peer-reviewed preprint (s)he probably read online somewhere? Why were preprints allowed to be viewable by it, given the hazard of self-administering that viewing posed? The orangutan should have left its wound untreated until it, its peers, all the orangutan organizations offering standard-of-care wound treatments, and their regulators had completed analyzing all the results of all the independent clinical trials in one comprehensive meta-study. (If there had been any clinical trials undertaken while the meta study was being analyzed, then make that two comprehensive meta-studies, and hope they don't result in a tie. If the leaf treatment worked, we wouldn't be calling it a leaf, we would call it medicine.
Pssh total pseudoscientist orangutan stuck in some institution-distrusting online subculture bubble.
It would be nice if they could work out what this "medicinal" tree is and start mass-producing this paste because that looks like some serious healing going on there! ... or perhaps orangutans are just way better at this sort of thing that human are? I recently tripped up running and had a much smaller cut (compared to the apparent missing-chunk-of-flesh this orangutan had) on my knee that took several weeks to fully heal.
> The team then saw Rakus chewing the stem and leaves of plant called Akar Kuning - an anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial plant that is also used locally to treat malaria and diabetes.
Wounds on/near joints are known to heal much more slowly because of the added movement-induced stress. In contrast, facial wounds heal particularly fast¹.
For instance, I had a bike accident last September, which resulted in a small wound on my knee and several bigger, more severe injuries in my face. (I basically did a face plant.) The facial injuries healed within 2 weeks. Meanwhile, to this day people ask me what's wrong with my knee because while the wound has closed, I have severe scar tissue and it still looks like the accident had occurred only a few days ago.
¹) Not sure whether it's true but I read somewhere that this might have been selected for during evolution, since the face plays such a crucial role in communication.
There's obviously a lot of nonsense that floats around in the herbal medicine community. But antimicrobial plants are relatively common, and applied topically, they do what you would expect them to. They generally aren't an antibiotic replacement because they aren't orally bio-available. They won't reach an infection in the periphery if you eat them.
To make a medicinal plant more effective you can immerse a lot of it in a solvent and use that to extract and concentrate the chemical you care about. These concentrates are commonly referred to as "essential oils".
None of this stuff was invented by a person, working for a corporation, and so you should not expect to see any of it commercialized, regardless of its efficacy. There will always be a synthetic analog, usually more effective (because it has been designed), and more importantly, patent-able.
that's a tincture or elixir, not an essential oil. essential oils are usually obtained by steam distillation, which does not involve a solvent. and there are lots of tinctures, elixirs, and essential oils commercially available
There are all sorts of beneficial chemicals in nature, way more than we've accurately assessed and documented. Because plants can't be patented, they're left largely unknown - the incentives that might bring access to things like this are almost entirely missing from the modern Western market.
Wild plants themselves can’t be patented, but chemicals derived from plants can be, provided they are non-obvious and have utility. Novel plants like GMOs can also be patented.
What's new is it's the first time an animal has been observed treating a wound with plants we know to be medically beneficial.
It's not the first time we've seen animals use medically beneficial plants (orally before) and it's not the first time we've seen attempts to treat wounds (previous by placing insects on them, but we don't know if that was medically beneficial or pointless action).
More than likely the plant has a noticeable topical anesthetic effect - Orangutans don't have an explicit mechanism for passing abstract knowledge so the phenomena has to be explained subjectively. It might be a particular cooling effect, or something recognizable about the plant that it contrasted against an injury for which it didn't use the plant. Or it observed another ape that did have such a subjective effect and comparison - the Einstein of orangutans might have figured it out generations ago and they've been imitating a successful behavior since then.
The plant has been studied and analyzed, with various papers out there, like this one, but there doesn't seem to be anything recognized as effective for people (yet, more studies are probably needed) :
In previous studies, it was found that the Akar Kuning (Arcangelisia
flava Merr) contains chemical compounds, including saponins,
flavonoids and tannins, besides that the roots also contain glycosides
and alkaloids, especially the isokuinolin group, namely berberine,
jatrorizin, and palmatin. There are also some minor alkaloids such
as columbamine dehidrokoridalmin, homoaromolin and talifendin,
and fibraleucin terpenes, and fibraurin has several activities such as
antifungal, antiasma, antibacterial, anti-tumor, anti-malarial and anti-
inflammatory.
This is most probably the main reason. However there is some debate on whether these learned behaviours can be passed across generations.
Here is David Attenborough showing Orangutans washing clothes/using soap/tools/etc. mimicking what they have seen Humans in their environment do - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFACrIx5SZ0
This is an animal living in the wild who did not have contact with humans. The article mentions that he may have learned it from other orangutans, but says nothing about humans.
Yeah, i read that but i don't think it tells the whole story. In Borneo they live in close quarters with Humans and often observe people (i.e. curiosity) from the forest's edge and may have picked up something via this way. They are very clever primates and hence could have picked up this behaviour in any number of ways.
We have systematized these pursuits. Even before modern science, language could be used to crudely pool together individual trial and error as a huge force multiplier.
Some tribes have a drug with sophisticated preparation steps from multiple plants and they claim the plants spoke to them about their ability. Carrots were pencil thin woody roots, almonds were fatal, bananas were half rock hard seeds, rice was just another grass, wolves were skittish and bare their teeth at humans. How did ancient humans see potential in them?
I would imagine that a lot of wild plants that we regard as not particularly edible can look much more enticing when that's basically your only choice of food.
As far as wolves, it's still an open question as to how much they "self-domesticated" before humans noticed and started working from the other end. Seeing how human encampments would produce delicious food scraps in refuse (and still do, just ask any black bear!), it stands to reason that some animals would try to cash in on that opportunity. Then you have a selection process whereby the ones that are too skittish would not even bother, and the ones that are too aggressive would be chased away or worse.
I’ve often wondered how the heck did people invent soap? What made them think mix ashes and fat together and use the result to make stuff cleaner? (And that’s ignoring the fact that at a molecular level, soap is pretty amazing in and of itself.)
Not only that. A lot of mushrooms can be eaten in small doses but will cause things like stomach upset well before death. I'd bet we as a species would quickly test mushrooms this way without dieing.
I don't think this is true- every dog I've had eats grass frequently and it doesn't usually cause them to throw up. Also- dogs can throw up on demand at any time, they don't need anything like grass to help them. This is because it is the natural way that female dogs bring home food for puppies, they vomit up the food to share it with them.
I'm pretty sure dogs sometimes vomit on purpose with the explicit goal of sharing food with humans, and/or just to eat it again for fun out of boredom. When my dog is bored he will often start preparing to vomit, and if I tell him 'no', he will stop.
I think humans have a hard time understanding animal behavior, and consistently underestimate their intelligence because we don’t understand or relate to their motivations and interests.
We take our values and motivations as objective facts, and don’t even consider that maybe dogs enjoy eating grass, and also aren’t that interested in the weird sounds humans like to make with their mouths.
Not sure about the latter statement. Our dog is very interested in any keyword verbalised by us that may relate to receiving food or a walk or a ride in the car (from pretty much any corner of the house). She appears to be permanently listening to every sound we make.
She probably does. Wolves in the wild eat the undigested stomach contents of their herbivorous prey. This food source is missing from modern dog food, so domestic dogs make up for it by eating plants directly.
I know I'm humanizing Rakus here but I'd like to think that, when he kisses the tree towards the end of the video, he does so out of gratitude for helping him. :-)
Apparently orangutans do kiss to show affection. And the lips are probably full of nerve endings for foraging purposes anyway. So who knows, maybe he was actually kissing that tree to show some kind of positive emotion, whether it's a kind of reciprocal appreciation similar to what we'd consider "gratitude" for helping him, something associative on a simpler level for making him feel better, or maybe a different, uniquely orangutan emotion that we don't have the words for.
> I know I'm humanizing Rakus here
Out of all the species on this planet, orangutans probably have some of the emotions that are the closest to human emotions. Like, would you expect Ancient Greeks to have emotional experiences that are recognisable to you? What about Cro-Magnons? Neanderthals? Australopithecines? Where do they stop being people with rich inner lives, and turn into animals driven by instinct?
Orangutans are tree-dwelling (semi)social fruit eaters, like we were not that long ago. If you set the Tree of Life to "Zoom to Fit", we'd blend right together. "Humanizing" would be if you were talking about an octopus, a fish, or a protozoan. Different humans at different extremes already experience emotions in vastly different ways; I don't think it's unthinkable or odd that the median individual in such a closely related species might have experiences which we can relate to.
But also he looked to me like he was chewing in the last couple seconds, so maybe the other commenter saying he was just eating ants was right lol.
Orang Utan stay with their mothers for six to seven years to learn what to eat and where to find it, and visit their mothers until they reach the age of 15 or 16.
Monkey see, monkey do, and orangutan think and understand. orangutan are quite smart and can associate ideas, communicate and share knowledge. They are considered as one of the most intelligent primate.
It seems odd to me the go to would be 'genetic' memory, when mammals pretty much universally engage in learning and cultural sharing.
I'm not sure about where these orangutans live, but my guess would be that, if it is not a thing the orangutans knew, centuries of living alongside humans... they probably picked up a thing or two. They're quite smart creatures.
> Dr Laumer says it is possible that it was the first time Rakus had done this type of treatment. “It could be that he accidentally touched his wound with his finger that had the plant on it. And then because the plant has quite potent pain relieving substances he might have felt immediate pain relief, which made him apply it again and again," she says.
I don't think people label plants as inherently alternative medicine. Plenty of non-alternative (aka regular) medicine was originally derived from plants (e.g. aspirin).
Things typically become labeled "medicine" when they've been work and have been tested. "Alternative" kind of works like a logical `not`, so applying de Morgan's law that implies that alternative medicine either has not been tested or doesn't work.
Obviously that's a kind of reductive take, but I don't think it's fair to say that scientists label all things from "plants" as "alternative".
It's not about what people or scientists say. It's the wrong frame to think about it in.
Pharmaceuticals these days run as businesses, and its not financially beneficial for them to even quantify the medicinal qualities of chemically unprocessed plants. Because you can't build a competitive advantage around something like that. So, while they often take inspiration taken from plant based compounds, usually the essential compounds are extracted, a synthetic process developed to manufacture them, and only the medical properties of the resultant product studied via trials.
It would do well for publicly funded medicine to reserve some funding for quantifying the medicinal properties of plants used directly.
USA's FDA is notorious for not finding therapeutical effect in plant medicines. The same plants which have been in use for 100s years in ex-USSR and Germany. USSR's pharma was relatively prudent and would not peddle non-working solutions for New Age reasons.
The articles I posted were for the NIH, not the FDA. They are two separate organizations, with admittedly some overlap, but still distinct.
The NIH researches lots of potential health claims and will publish their data as well. The stuff I linked was two examples that I found in like ten seconds, but there’s tons more. The NIH is much more of a research organization than regulatory, unlike the FDA.
I just felt it prudent because the person I was responding to was lamenting about not having a publicly funded research body to investigate potential health benefits for plants that is simply untrue in the US.
My first thought on reading this was of Tim Minchin's epic beat poem 'Storm' [0] - jump to 3:05 if you want to hear the bit that specifically deals with this.
>Things typically become labeled "medicine" when they've been work and have been tested
Eh, sometimes. But often things labeled "medicine" are things that companies can get FDA approval for, patent, manufacture, ensure shelf stability, label with a brand, and sell to customers at a high margin. There are lots of plants that are proven to work but aren't sold to customers because they can't meet some of those criteria. They aren't necessarily worse, just can't be be sold at scale profitably.
I don't know why your comment was dead/flagged, what you're saying isn't a new thing at all. If anyone's interested in similar things look up patent evergreening. As someone using life-saving drugs that are patented despite the creators of the said drug selling the rights for a dollar to prevent pharmaceutical capture, this stuff is irritating at best and deadly at worst.
My uninformed opinion is that anything which hasn't been distilled into a single compound won't be called medicine by the medical industry. How they manage to study those that are only beneficial when converging with other compounds, I have no idea.
I have some background in pharmacology, particularly psychopharmacology and I can tell you that it's not even remotely true. There's so much studies out there... so, what kind of studies were you reading?
For example - Rapamycin/sirolimus, ephedrine, morphine, antibiotics (e.g. penicillins, cephalosporins), psilocin and psilocybin, are the first naturally occuring (in significant quantities) that came to my mind when thinking about some. Neither of these were studied only in any combination drugs (FDCs). And a lot of close derivatives of naturally occuring substances, like aspirin. This could be really a huge list (of both).
Was the claim I was responding to justified anyhow, though?
It's literally one query to https://scholar.google.com or any other search engine of choice, should I link to search results? Okay, so append ?q=[substance name] at the end of the URL. I don't mean to come off as rude, though. But it's really simple to do so, and it won't really serve any purpose to link to particular studies, either, as this could in turn add a potentially huge selection bias.
By the way, for more "obscure" in terms of scientific interest compounds see: beberine, theanine (aka l-theanine), vinpocetine. Particularly the last one. Same. These ones don't even have any synthetic counterparts which will share same or similar mechanism of action (there are other synthetic compounds targeting the same receptors, but they still represent very unique combinations of targets and also often have unique pharmacodynamics in relation to these targets).
I was pushing him in the stroller while he was napping, and at the orangutan exhibit, one came up to the window and gestured towards the stroller.
I turned the stroller to face the window, and removed the hood.
The orangutan blew my son a kiss, waved then went back to the otherside of its enclosure.
Made me rethink what I knew about animal intelligence.